


As I Lay Down to Die

by eech



Category: Stranger Things (TV 2016)
Genre: Alternate Universe - Canon Divergence, Battle of Starcourt (Stranger Things), Gen
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2020-06-18
Updated: 2020-06-18
Packaged: 2021-03-03 23:15:04
Rating: Not Rated
Warnings: Major Character Death
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,425
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/24783706
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/eech/pseuds/eech
Summary: “I don’t know how to say this, I-” Joyce looked away, at a spot of gravel on the pavement, and put a warm hand on Karen’s shoulder, “Karen, Mike was- Mike was in the mall when everything happened-”Her first thought was: what would he be doing in the mall after closing hours? Her second thought was: where is he?“Can I see him? Is he alright? Is he hurt?” Ted’s hand fell on her other shoulder. His presence didn’t offer as much comfort as it should have.Holly was sleeping in the car, and Karen hoped that she wouldn’t wake up with both of her parents gone and a fiery hellscape through the window.“Karen…” Joyce’s voice went imperceptibly soft, “Mike has… he passed away. No pu-” her throat caught, “no pulse when they found him. They tried a defibrillator, ten, twenty times over, but-”
Relationships: Karen Wheeler & Mike Wheeler
Comments: 1
Kudos: 29





	As I Lay Down to Die

Karen knew not to rubberneck. Of course she did, because it wasn’t  _ polite,  _ and politeness was the first item in her mother’s five tenets of ladyhood. But it looked so  _ horrible,  _ she couldn’t help but urge Ted to take a little detour, if only to pass by and see what was going on. She was curious.

As they inched by, rubber in prolonged contact with asphalt, she could see just the barest hint of flames licking up through the roof of the mall. By God-- had it only been this morning that she’d been there? She’d taken Holly with her to grab something or the other that they’d been missing for the little block party. It’d been so alive, so vibrant, and now it was half-way caved-in, a convection oven surrounded by helicopters and firetrucks.

Stopped, now, a firefighter took notice of them. His face was half-hidden beneath a helmet and visor. He looked young, probably just out of vocational school, closer even to Mike’s age than Karen’s. Where was Mike, again? She couldn’t remember the excuse this time-- Will’s place, or was it a movie, or was he at the fair? Of course she could tell that he was off with some mystery girl. He might actually have been at Will’s, though when Joyce had come by, looking frantic, with the Police Chief in tow, she didn’t seem to know where either of them were. It would stand to reason that they would be together, then.

“C’mon, Karen, let’s just go,” Ted grumbled, drumming on the steering wheel. She pointedly ignored him, instead turning to watch the approach of the firefighter.

She waited for him to rap on the glass with the knuckle of his pointer finger before rolling down the window. 

“We’re working on closing this section of the road down, ma’am. I’m afraid you’ll have to move along for now,” the firefighter said, teeth yellow when he smiled. It made him far less handsome. Tenet five: always practice good hygiene. 

“Of course, firefighter--” she inclined her head as if to say  _ what’s your name, again?  _ As if they were old acquaintances who caught a passing glimpse of each other in the big city, years gone by, and not two strangers in polite, curt conversation. But men were always more inclined to give you information when you were friendly. The more quickly you warmed up to them, the more quickly they believed that they had something to offer you other than intel. This was something she’d learned all on her own, no tenets required, because being a lady never got you very far in life. 

“Oh,” the faintest of blushes graced his cheeks, “Jared Swamper.”

She reached her hand out of the car, clasping his calloused paw in her own lacquered fingers. Out of the corner of her eye, Ted placed his head gently down on the steering wheel. 

“Karen Wheeler. It’s a pleasure. Might I ask what exactly happened here?”

“Just a fire, ma’am, someone left a stove on in one of the shops-- unfortunate, that--” and wasn’t that just a crock of bullshit.

If it was just a fire, why were the U.S. goddamned forces here? There wasn’t anything that pointed to it being  _ just a fire _ , outside of the slowly receding flames and the rain-like downpour from the helicopters circling the hulking mall. She knew something else was going on-- something else had  _ always  _ been going on in Hawkins, but as usual, nobody seemed to be particularly interested in divulging this information to her. Flirtations or not. 

She saw the back of someone that looked, distantly, like Joyce Byers in a Soviet uniform, and spared a brief moment of worry for Nancy and Mike. 

“--wait, did you say Karen Wheeler?” Jared asked, suddenly looking very nervous and very, very uncomfortable.

“Why yes, I did. Did you go to school with my daughter?” she searched the depths of her mind for any mentions of a  _ Jared  _ or a  _ Swamper,  _ perhaps an estranged friend or an old beau-- but she came up blank.

“No, um, I went to high school the town over. But, ma’am, they’ve-- uh, we’ve been told to keep an eye out for you. Would you mind stepping out of the car? Don’t worry-- you’re not in trouble or anything, but we need to speak to you-- and your husband, too.”

_ Them?  _ What would they ever need them for? Karen and Theodore Wheeler, middle-class nuclear family picket fence Karen and Theodore Wheeler? But she stepped out of the car, anyways, and nervously cleared her throat. 

She followed him under the yellow caution tape, her apprehension obvious even down to the light rustle of her blouse. And as they neared the congregation of fire-trucks and ambulances, she realized that the woman that had looked distantly like Joyce Byers  _ was  _ in fact Joyce Byers, evidenced by the fact that when she turned around, she rushed over to Karen immediately. 

“Karen, oh God-- I told them to call your house, you got the messages, didn’t you? I’m so, so sorry--” 

Karen pried the woman off of her, holding her at an arm’s length. It was faintly reminiscent of those cartoons where the taller character would press their palm to the shorter character’s forehead and watch as they tried to land a hit. It was sort of absurd.

“I have no idea what you’re talking about, Joyce. I’ve been at the fair-- you saw me, remember?” 

Joyce drooped, “oh, heavens, no. I completely forgot, with the day I’ve had-- oh, shit,” she looked around, searching for an answer. Jared had completely disappeared. 

“Joyce, tell it to me straight. What the hell happened, and why do I-- and  _ you-- _ have anything to do with it?” 

The artificial rain poured down, and as a shiver ran up and down her spine, she realized exactly how cold it was-- midsummer or not. Joyce looked at her in what could be most closely approximated to  _ fear,  _ and it sent Karen’s stomach plummeting down to the cradle of her pelvis, and threatened to send it even farther, squeezing down the viscera of her leg until it poured out from between her toes. 

“I don’t know how to say this, I--” Joyce looked away, at a spot of gravel on the pavement, and put a warm hand on Karen’s shoulder, “Karen, Mike was-- Mike was in the mall when everything happened--”

Her first thought was: what would he be doing in the mall after closing hours? Her second thought was: where is he?

“Can I see him? Is he alright? Is he hurt?” Ted’s hand fell on her other shoulder. His presence didn’t offer as much comfort as it should have. 

Holly was sleeping in the car, and Karen hoped that she wouldn’t wake up with both of her parents gone and a fiery hellscape through the window. 

“Karen…” Joyce’s voice went imperceptibly soft, “Mike has… he passed away. No pu--” her throat caught, “no pulse when they found him. They tried a defibrillator, ten, twenty times over, but--”

She straightened up, shook her head. Something in her was spinning, dizzy, but it wasn’t her mind. No, she could think in a neat, ruler-straight line, she could match up causation to correlation, she understood the causality that led point A to point B. What she understood precisely, in that moment, was how it felt to be numb. That was dizzying, and it sent her emotions far, far away. 

“I need to see him.”

“Karen…”

Because it wasn’t true until she saw it. It could be untrue-- it could be a mistake. She wasn’t in denial, but she needed to, with complete and total surety, verify the claim. The thesis that had been presented was that her  _ son,  _ her Mike, was dead, and now she needed to see the sources. 

“I need to see him, Joyce. Please. No matter how bad it is.”

She didn’t know what she was expecting. A burnt, blackened husk, maybe, charred beyond recognition. Maybe something gorier than that-- skin sliding off in sheets, raised welts and the smell of burning flesh and hair. Even just a corpse, stained with soot, sallow and dead. Her son, but  _ not _ . An approximation of her son, like the way the memory of someone is usually just a bit off from the real thing. A memory, that was all it would be.

What she wasn’t expecting was her  _ son.  _

She figured, staring at the white sheet bunched up at his knees before moving back up to his face, that she could wipe the blood off, give him some gauze and a bandage and an icepack and he’d be right as rain in a couple days’ time. It was a superficial wound, mostly, amounting to only a minor concussion and a big scratch that looked worse than it was. A bloody nose, a scar on the forehead-- it was something minor, something she could fix up, she figured. 

He was just sleeping. He looked like he was just sleeping, and somehow that was so much worse than anything else. Because if she closed her eyes, opened them again, shook him a bit, he’d be coaxed out of bed, right? 

She trembled. Behind her, she could hear Ted crying, and they were finally a united front in the worst way possible. In grief, they were the same. But while tears slipped down his face, hidden by the torrential rain, her eyes were dry. She didn’t think she could cry, not really. 

Grasped by some wanton dregs of her girlhood, she whispered his name, over and over--  _ Mike, Mike, Mike,  _ and maybe if she had been in front of the bathroom mirror, limned by a solitary, flickering candle, he would appear behind her, a specter, and complain about having to get rid of his Atari. 

But that did not happen, and Mike stayed unmoving. 

“H-how did h-he die?” she asked, gripping the rail on the side of the stretcher. 

“I’ll-- I don’t know if I can tell-=”

“My  _ son-- _ ” Karen took a deep breath, but her blind, searching fingers couldn’t find her hard-handled composure, “my son is goddamned  _ dead,  _ Joyce. He’s  _ dead,  _ so spare me the  _ bullshit  _ and tell me what the hell happened?” 

And for the first time in her life, she was told. Joyce sat her down, in the back of an ambulance, with a rotating cast of belligerents in the Battle of Starcourt Mall, as it was so aptly named, all equally as distraught and looking just this side of deranged. Dustin and Lucas and Will and Max and a girl that Karen thought she’d seen, once or twice, swam in and out of her vision, her husband grasped her arm, the police chief made a brief interlude, but she couldn’t see them, she couldn’t feel them. All she could do was hear as her life was unraveled before her. 

Joyce told her, first and foremost, that Billy Hargrove-- possessed by some interdimensional being-- killed her son. Karen laughed, because it sounded like something from Mike’s Dungeons and Dragons game, but she believed it. Then Joyce told her that Mike was thrown against a wall, because he couldn’t run away fast enough. Karen asked if Mike suffered, if he was in pain, and Joyce said  _ probably.  _ She said that if you turned Mike’s head just an inch to the side, you could see the hole in his skull, the cracks from which his brain leaked. That Max, also thrown against a wall, woke up to find Mike’s grey matter oozing out of his ears, blood pooling under his head, un-breathing, un-moving, and Karen wished that Mike also got to wake up. That as soon as the first responders came, as soon as they saw Nancy frantically doing chest compressions, they knew that he was unsaveable-- but they shocked his chest over and over again, anyways. And oh, God--  _ Nancy. _ At least she made it out alive. Then Joyce told her everything else, and Karen was wondering why the hell she hadn’t been told sooner. Both of her children had been involved in this-- this  _ shit  _ for three years and she only got to learn about it when one of them  _ died?  _

She couldn’t help but feel that if she’d known, something would have turned out different. That maybe there wouldn’t be a Mike-shaped hole carving its way out in her chest, that maybe she’d have three children, that maybe, even, none of this fiasco would’ve happened at all. And she knew it was a false fantasy, because even if she  _ had  _ known, she was no superhero. She was Karen Wheeler, and try as she might to believe it, she couldn’t take down a whole Russian compound on her lonesome. But she wished she would’ve  _ known--  _ that she would’ve hugged Mike goodbye this morning, gone to some crazy man’s cabin with Joyce and the police chief, that she could’ve  _ known  _ that that might be the last time she would ever see her son. But she didn’t get any of that.

In the face of this glaring omission, she stood up, and took four, five, six mechanical steps, and then she screamed. She screamed until her lungs went raw, and people were grabbing at her and platitudes were being pushed through her ears and all she could think about was  _ he’s dead, he’s dead, my beautiful son is dead,  _ and all she could think about was the brain matter still on the linoleum of the mall, and all she could think about was absolutely nothing at all. 

Hushed voices ripped her eardrums as they said, “ _ calm down, it’s okay, calm down, _ ” but she couldn’t. Who gave them the right to tell her to calm down? Who gave them the right to claim that it was okay? Her son was  _ dead,  _ and she could scream and cry and  _ not calm down  _ as much as she wanted to. She didn’t need to calm down. It wasn’t going to be okay. Couldn’t they see that? 

She couldn’t remember what the last thing she said to Mike was, and Holly was still in the car. Nancy was somewhere, probably here, and she couldn’t remember what the last thing she said to Mike was. Probably something inconsequential. What had their last conversation been about? She couldn’t remember, because she hadn’t known that it might be the last thing. She hadn’t known. 

She screamed, and screamed, and screamed, and hoped that if she passed out, she wouldn’t wake up to a world without her son in it. 

  
  


**Author's Note:**

> I wrote this fic awhile ago, last fall maybe (?) and it's been sitting around. Originally it was going to be several key characters reacting to Mike's death, but I fell out of interest in the show and had no interest in continuing this, but the Karen chapter was complete and I felt like I should post it since I really liked the writing in this one.
> 
> Generally unbeta'd and unedited due to the fact that I'm posting this completely on a whim.
> 
> Hope you liked it! Please leave a kudos or a comment if you're obliging <3


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